BRAD HAMPTON ARTIST STATEMENT :
Terrestrial in origin and electronic in spirit, my paintings are as much about the future of our communal headspace as they are about the history of landscape. I make paintings about in-between spaces: air pockets, breathing room, place-holders, redactions. Abstraction is a language that allows me pause, that still permits an inconclusive ellipsis or a question mark. I love words, but I'm even more intrigued by the gasps in interaction when words become unintelligible ... or disappear altogether.
In my paintings, I create situations that arise from object relationships. I'm interested in how a pause can become the subject of a sentence, the tension that makes complementary colors argue, the way a single cloud hovers sentinel-like over land when seen from above or when "plan or elevation" perspective tricks our eye into looking into a space - or projecting onto it. Recently, I specifically give body to the void that is my favorite subject, fabricating plastic impasto "puffy stickers " that appear as a kind of commercial appliqué in my paintings. Childish in form and commercially charged in their essence, these paint proxies both add and subtract from their environment, casting shadows, creating new landforms, forming bubble worlds that blithely tune out the digital noise of the information plane below. Just as my studio days are spent in retreat from my daily civilian workout with words, my paintings are documents of reconnaissance wanderings across a melting, noisy world and of finding new ways to literally draw a blank.
ABOUT BRAD HAMPTON'S WORK :
The white marks that float through and define Brad Hampton's new work are not holes.
They are also not exactly marks. In these bold and fascinating pieces these shapes function in complex ways. On the one hand, they are the enigmatic and playful descendants of Lichtenstein's word balloons. On the other they skitter off the edge into the no man's land of the world beyond the work's border creating a crazy new dimension. They lie on top of other denser imagery derived from the fritzing of information in the scanned world. They dance around like calligraphy but their relationship to the visual world and to representation in general opens whole new realms of ways to think about space, the machine, and the hand. Visually full and lush, these new works are also powerful puzzles that question the boundaries between the real and the represented. - Laurie Anderson, New York, August 2013